"They fuck you up, your mum and dad," Hull's most celebrated librarian-poet Philip Larkin once wrote, and the sentiment behind that bilious opening bark from This Be the Verse will not be lost on viewers of Project Nim. It's probably a sentiment that would raise a wry, bushy eyebrow from Nim himself, the chimpanzee subject of Academy Award-winning James Marsh's absorbing return to the Sundance film festival.

Everyone knows chimps are smart, but what the British film-maker's follow-up to his 2008 Sundance hit and Oscar winner Man on Wire reveals is more interesting. Project Nim, one of several opening night films that kicked off the festival yesterday, spans 26 years and recounts the story of the titular primate as he is plucked from his mother in infancy and thrust into a succession of experiments that range from the pseudo-scientific to something altogether more unsettling.

Monkey business ... James Marsh answers questions about Project Nim at the Sundance film festival yesterday. Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images

The starting point of Project Nim, funded by BBC Films and the now defunct UK Film Council, is an investigation by Columbia psychologist Herb Terrace into the notion that a chimpanzee raised among people might master human communication. To discover the answer, Terrace thrusts Nim into the bosom of a willing colleague's rich, hippy household in New York. It is in this chaotic petri dish that the animal comes under the well-meaning scrutiny of his adopted family and ingratiates himself with his carers, to the delight of some and the chagrin of others.

Amid loosely arranged sign language classes and social education, Nim advances through a safari of human dynamics to reveal a knack for manipulating the big game. His teachers struggle to assert themselves over his destiny and form relationships with one other, reveal divergent educational ideologies and become consumed by their project. Nim's acute social intelligence might already be sufficient evidence of the keen mind that lurks within the beast, but that's not enough for his handlers. The film's initial warm and fuzzy tone slides into something stranger as the line between objective study and human ambition becomes blurred.

Nim is adorable, playful, stubborn, vulnerable and possessive – just like a child – but that's nothing compared to the humans who prance around him. The New York hippies are merely the start of a confounding parade of homes, owners and experiments that Nim must endure. Marsh uses talking head interviews, archival footage and reconstructed scenes to draw us into an epic drama that swirls around this creature and the desires of those who would attempt to shape him. What emerges is a telling exposé of human vanity that reminds us that while our close genetic relatives are as intelligent as they come, we can be the biggest chumps.